Customer Reviews

Maxtor 1.5 TB OneTouch III Turbo Edition Hard Drive ( C01W015 )

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(23)

 

 

I bought several of these RAIDS from Amazon. I bought two 1TB, one 500GB, and one 1.5TB. The 1TB RAIDS worked out of the box. Formatted to NTFS. The 1.5TB RAID set up to RAID1 started showing corruption on the file system within a week.

I deleted the partition and set it up as RAID0 striping figuring I would use on of the other 1TB RAIDS as a true backup of each other. The 1.5TB formatted to about 80% and hung for 2 days. I tried again and it hung at 80%. I tried formatting with my laptop. Same problem with the 80% stall. I used my new dual-core 3 GHz Biostar 6000 box to format via firewire. Again it stalled at 80%.

I went to the vendor and exchanged it for a new one. I went home and started the formatting fiasco again. It hung at 80% on my external DMZ box and again on my regular workstation. I returned the 1.5TB drive and opened a ticket with Maxtor anyway. From the feedback I've been getting on the ticket I'm not too confident that a solution will be forthcoming.

What I did find out while surfing the web looking for some tips on these drives is that there are many reported issues with them. First, when there is a failure, your data is gone. It seems the controllers on these are not what I would want to put critical data through. I'm reading about hard drive failures and unsuccessful attempts at users trying to recover their data at the cost of losing the warrantee.

Maxtor put an HPA area on the drives that cripples attempts to use a replacement drive. No reason for this from what I can see other than looking at their webpage and seeing their data recovery services. After reading forums today I haven't had time to mount the drives with any of my forensic packages to see the internals of the HPA. I can also see no reason to have an HPA on the drives at all. The controller should be handling all RAID functions. RAID should be hot swappable! The "I" in RAID being inexpensive is hard to swallow when paying full retail top dollar for a drive. I don't see a need to image a physical drive and then have to image the HPA block by block to get past the "swap protection".

Looking a little deeper and I came across an attorney webpage looking for owners of these drives for their participation in a class action lawsuit. Search under Sklar Law Offices. Seems there is something brewing. I'm certified in forensics, security, and Cisco networking with 15 years combined experience in both the NYPD and technology and I may just give them a call to really pick one of these drives apart.

I just had a run-in with Maxtor. After purchasing their drive, it failed within 6 months. I was then told that I would be charged a MINIMUM of $700. Data recovery, you see, is apparently not covered by the warranty. If you attempt to recover it anywhere else, since they have to open the drive to do it, you're no longer under the warranty.

I was then told by them that I should never rely upon one backup unit. THE POINT WAS THAT IT WAS THE BACKUP UNIT! For such an expensive item, I think I deserve more service.

We bought one of these for our department at a hospital. It failed. The replacement failed, and the replacement for the replacement failed. Rather than send it back and get a FOURTH one, we've voided out warranty and ripped it apart, and are putting the drives inside (which are still readable) in a different enclosure.

Something that should be a huge warning sign to anyone thinking of buying one of these (and which we will watch out for in the future) is that the drives are not user-swappable. THAT'S THE WHOLE POINT OF A MIRRORED RAID ARRAY! When one of the drives goes bad, the user can swap it out with another one him/herself!

I'm a tech teacher and own 4x500 WD MyBooks, a 400Gb Seagate, 2 300Gb Maxtors and a few generic 250Gb drives. This Maxtor 1.5 TB OneTouch III Turbo Edition looks like bad news - it failed to format to NTFS, hanging at at ~ 73% for about a day. I tried a second time, and could see no indication that this drive will ever format completely. I just don't have the time to spend days waiting around for drives to format - they should do so right out of the box, or Maxtor should supply them pre-formatted for either Mac and PC. Rating: Not ready for prime time - "One Touch" won't do it!

The Maxtor 1.5 TB is not ready for prime time!

I had two different units in the last two weeks. Both units have the same issues:
1. Can not complete a full format (PC - XP SP2). Hangs at ~77% (for days!).
2. Firewire 800 is slow. Tried Orangeware, Unibrain and Microsoft Hot fix drivers and each one of them has a diffrent issue with this HD drive.

Units were returned for refund

I have sent one back and Maxtor sent me a new one. Now it's dying and I have to send that back. There are no refunds. Some of the problems that occur with this drive are: Trouble mounting and unmounting drive. Slows down with streaming. Freezes up completely. The other thing is this drive is huge and heavy. I first lost about 500 gigs of data and Maxtor claimed they could retrieve it for me...at a minimum cost of $750!!! If you see people with 5 stars on their comments...it's only because they aren't quite there yet with these problems. This would not make a good back up drive or working drive at all!!! Buy something else.

Just like to echo other purchasers of this drive- Don't Buy It! had the drive for a week set up as my Time Machine backup and video backup - big mistake as awoke to loud clicking - drive no longer recognized by my machine couldn't mount it to repair so took it apart found one drive totally hosed reformatted the other total waste of time and money.

I used to own this drive. Note very carefully how I say "used to". This is because the drive failed catastrophically. One might even go as far as to say "EPIC FAIL" if one were so inclined.

While transferring files from the external to a new internal drive, the drive itself started to make a clicking sound. The transfer was interrupted,the drive itself disappeared from My Computer and the transferred data was corrupted beyond recovery.

The drive itself was dead, and it was trying to take over seven years of my career as a professional artist with it.

It was *physically* damaged, which necessitated sending it to a Class 100 clean room. Due to it being a pair of 750gb drives in a striped RAID-0 array, the recovery was even MORE expensive than a standard forensic data rescue. It has cost me just under $4000 to save my data and my career.

I will NEVER buy Maxtor products again. EVER.

Similar to the guy above, I bought this and set it up with full RAID 1 mirroring, because I need absolute data safety for my software company. A few months in and files start disappearing. Ran the diagnostics tool that comes with Maxtor's software, and it says the drive is A-OK. Run Windows check-disk, and Windows says it can't complete the check with no explanation.

The horribly ironic thing is that the pair of drives are no doubt doing just fine -- it appears to be the Maxtor driver on this device that is corrupting the file system.

The entire purpose of RAID 1 is to protect your data in the event of drive failure. However, attempting to replace a busted drive yourself voids your Warranty, and appears to be extremely difficult to do with the OneTouch anyway. On the other hand, sending your drive into Maxtor for warranty service guarantees that all your data will be lost, quoted from Maxtor's replacement policy: "All data and software on your returned drive(s) will be lost." So let me get this straight -- with RAID 1 mirroring, you still need to pay for Maxtor's Data Recovery service if a drive in your OneTouch fails.

Kicking myself for not looking at product reviews before buying!

I purchased the 750GB. version of this product about a year ago from a local chain, and it still works great! However, for whatever reason, the power pack failed about 5 or so months ago, and I just bought another on eBay for $twenty something dollars instead of grafting the specific dc plug onto a new power pack-risky. I had opened it up to note one of the components had overheated and smoked/smoldered leaving black soot in the interior of pack case. I would also like to mention the 2 older/early Simpletech drives (like Simpleshare, over 2 yrs old) I have still work great, but on one of the two the power supply dc plug stopped holding in the female socket (and not electrically connected when holding it in) so I had to wrap in one layer of aluminum foil and insert so it would hold and engage electrically.